Pyrotechnics for the Soul
by Lex Munro
Summary: Cable & Deadpool crossover with my Fateverse. In another universe, Nate devotes his life to saving his best friend, who goes on to have one of the most important jobs in the multiverse. Warnings: language, terminal illness, bromance, euthanasia, sci-fi.
1. One Spark

a prequel piece to **Lighting Fires**. a look into the mind of the man who invented brainsliding.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. unrequited slash leanings. angsty angst. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s*** and f***).

**pairing:** one-sided Nate/Wade.

**timeline:** shortly after Earth-3838 makes first contact with the Network; Native Year AD 2553, Network Operations 725 (AD 3263).

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters.

**notes:** 1) the title is a reference both to the other pair of demo-squad-centric fics (**Lighting Fires** and **A World in Flames** [part of **Blood & Tears**]) and to the Katy Perry song "Who Am I Living For." 2) Nate's wall of notes is a big pane of LED-lit plastic, and he writes on it with white dry-erase marker. it's about ten feet tall (starting at ground-level) and fifteen feet wide. 3) "hobby...or a girlfriend" is a reference to **Get a Hobby** (in **Blood & Tears**), when the Traveler was talking with movie!Terry about getting over her mother's death.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>One Spark<strong>

Nathan sighs deeply and stands up to add another note to the wall of glowing words, phrases, and formulas.

There are monuments to him, holidays, a statue (maybe two by now; the bastards are working fast). Children are taught that he has brought their world enlightenment.

But this is his true life's work.

Finding the Network was an accident. A blip. Something that was only possible because Wade changed something in his notes without telling him, something that only actually happened because Neena was in the room and leaned on a button at the right time.

(Sometimes Nathan thinks, bitterly, that they are his good luck charms. He wishes someone could be a good luck charm for Wade. He supposes it is lucky enough that Wade has lived this long. People used to have months, not decades…if Wade's organs had failed in a different order, he would be dead now.)

He hears the low hum of the hoverchair in the door, and it stops his train of thought. Wade used to be able to sneak up on him. "How are you feeling?" he asks, stepping back to stare up at the gathered progress of more than thirty years.

(Even after all this time, he still hopes—_prays_—that the answer will spontaneously appear. That he has overlooked something. That this time tomorrow, Wade could be living again instead of dying.)

"Tired," Wade husks out. "You need a hobby. Or a girlfriend."

No.

No, Nathan needs a solution.

"This is more important," he says. It is his standard answer, when someone tries to take him away from this outside of his scheduled work hours.

(Since he found the Network, he has been asked to make a few public appearances, but they no longer ask him to work.)

"I don't need a hobby," he goes on. "Or a girlfriend. Just this. Here to lend your charming wit, or was there something official?"

"That guy," Wade goes on, and pauses to cough. "The. Whatshisface. Cartographer. Just arrived. Wants to talk. To you."

Nathan remembers a time when Wade would chatter nonstop, instead of in these scattered fragments and broken sentences. The pauses, the gaps in wording, the labored breaths, are all like the ticking of a clock…once Wade's lungs finally give out, they will have a maximum of five years before the strain from cancer, treatments, and mechanical organs necessitate heart replacement. As it is, they only have that much longer before the medications scrubbing his blood degenerate his marrow enough to start causing brain damage.

"About our medical research, I'm sure." Nathan sighs again, crosses out an old question on the margin of a diagram. "Isn't it ironic, that they can be so very far ahead of us in all other arenas of science, and they're still stumped when it comes to little things like smallpox and malaria?"

Wade tries to laugh, but it sends him into a coughing fit.

Nathan stares very hard at a chemical equation and hates himself.

Once upon a time, he would have rushed to his best friend's side…these days, he can barely look at Wade. Not because Wade is ugly or frightening or disgusting in his failing health, but because Nathan looks at that thin shadow of a man and can only see the warrior he used to be. Because it is another very visible sign that he still has yet to succeed. Because every day he does not find the answer is a day closer to Wade's body giving out.

"Shit," Wade finally croaks out, and clears his throat again. "Buncha fuckin'…time travelers. Woulda found…cure for cancer by now. You'd think."

Nathan shakes his head and reworks the equation (just in case). "We don't need them," he says quietly. "I'll find it—even if it's the last thing I do. Either I'll find it, or I'll find a way to get you out of there."

Wade scoffs. "Running outta…shit to replace. Whatcha gonna do? Stick my brain in a box, carry me around?"

The reminder of his constant failure stings, but he forces a wry grin. "I thought I'd make Nessa and Inez take turns carrying you. We'd call you our 'Wade-in-a-Box,' and draw a smiley on one side."

"Frowney on the other?"

"No. Wade-in-a-Box would always be happy."

"Really?" Wade chuckles. "Well…gonna go see whatshisname?"

"Unless they have a way of transferring consciousness or reconstructing physical bodies on the genetic level, he can talk to someone else. This is _more important_."

Wade wheezes out a sigh. "Nate—"

"Don't. Don't you dare. You _are_ worth it."

"Gonna kill yourself, dumbass. Think I want that?"

Nathan clenches a fist. "To be perfectly honest, Wade, I don't really give a shit what you want. Not about this. If it gives us a stepping stone, if it gets us even an _inch_ closer, it's worth it. Cross an inch sixty-three thousand, three hundred and sixty times, and you've crossed a mile."

He expects a witty rejoinder about tesseracts and hyperbolic point-to-point transition, but Wade says nothing.

In the long pause that follows, he can hear the rhythmic huff of Wade's breath and the muted conversations of people in the hall. He reaches up and erases part of a molecule, redraws it.

"Why?" Wade asks, finally.

"You know why."

"I don't."

"Then ignore it. Pretend I'm just being a stubborn, pigheaded know-it-all like always."

He does not want to say the words; they would only be a burden to Wade, who even now has half the women in the private military sector tripping over themselves for him. A world-class assassin who became a world-class physicist…a regular renaissance man, if only he could escape the crumbling prison of his body.

So Nathan settles for writing down a peptide chain in one of the tiny clear spaces left on his board. Every luminous line on the ten-foot-tall clear pane spells it out in the best, purest way he can imagine.

_I love you._

_I've always loved you._

_Even when there's nothing left of you, I'll love you._

"You were saying something about transfer of consciousness?" someone calls from the direction of the hall.

Nathan frowns again and turns.

The blond man from two days previous stands in the doorway. The Cartographer. Stupid name, in Nathan's opinion.

"I didn't mean to eavesdrop," the man says, holding his hands up in a gesture of neutrality. "One of our Head Programmers was talking about how the bulk of memory and personality is expressed through hyperbolic chronometric resonance, and that there could be a way to use that to try copying a person's consciousness into a new body."

Nathan's mind changes gears sharply, away from the old pastime of genetics and back to physics.

Sentience. Consciousness. Resonance.

Wade has always been better with gravimetric theory and hyperbolic chronometry, but Wade does not have Nathan's background in medicine through which to screen it.

He shakes his head. "It's useless without the proper analog in which to deposit the information. I mean, if you just copied the raw data, you wouldn't have a working consciousness, you'd just have a bunch of semi-meaningless passive bytes. The soul wouldn't follow."

But his mind is already moving, speeding along now, and he needs a place to get the thoughts written down.

He does not even hesitate.

He erases a huge section of his board and begins to fill it all over again.

_I love you._

_Even if it kills me._

**.End.**


	2. Firework

a sequel to **One Spark**, investigating the death of Professor Summers and the birth of Eight-ball. this is the stuff Anthony talked about in **Gestalt** (a **Fateverse Side Story**).

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. unrequited slash leanings. angsty angst. sort-of-kind-of character death (but technically not). language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***, f***, and g**damn).

**pairing:** one-sided Nate/Wade, plus Nate/Wade bromance.

**timeline:** probably about two years after **One Spark**; Native Year AD 2555, Network Operations 734 (AD 3272). [yes, you read those right; timelines are especially squirrelly when time travelers are involved]

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters.

**notes:** 1) the title is a reference to the Katy Perry song "Firework." 2) Wade's natural lungs have lasted longer than expected, because he's stubborn that way. 3) Wade told Traveler!Wade that he wrote his doctoral thesis on the effect of quantum entanglement on the probability of a branch being absorbed, which is apparently related to probability loci (you'd have to ask MerianMoriarty). 4) this may be only the third or fourth time i've _ever_ used future tense. certainly the first time i've posted something that used it.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Firework<strong>

Wade has often felt trapped by his body. Sometimes, especially more recently, he's wished the stupid thing would just quit on him already, instead of dragging things out.

It's a coward's thought, and he hates having it, but he _hurts_. Every day, almost constantly. His hands. His head. His useless, disobedient legs. His dying lungs.

Each breath claws at him, like hungry fingers dragging him into darkness.

He has only three escapes from the pain.

The first is the opiate painkiller they put him on twenty years ago. It numbs him, makes him drift. It makes him drowsy and forgetful, and he hates that—the forgetfulness. He hates feeling like he's wasting the time he's got. He should be helping the people he cares about _get over him_, helping them get used to the idea that he's _going to die_, and he thinks it's got to be harder on them if they see him losing himself. So he doesn't take the drugs unless the pain is just too much to bear that day.

The second is the fascinating world of hyperbolic chronometry, the quantum coral reef slowly making alien shapes out of the fabric of space-time. He can lose himself in mental exploration of the timestream for hours; blessed hours in which he barely notices the pain. Before, when his body still worked, when he was healthy and active and deadly, he hadn't cared about physics. He'd had some inkling that he was smart—but what did that matter, next to the ability to kill a guy with a pair of chopsticks? He'd been too busy having fun to think of things like the fabric of space-time, and things like gravity tunnels and tesseracts. Now he wonders if he was born hardwired for theoretical physics.

The third is being near Nate, his oldest and closest friend, but that brings a different pain that has been steadily growing. For a long time, Wade has suspected Nate might be far too attached to him. It doesn't bother him in an 'ew, I'm a homophobe and that's gross' kind of way. But it _does_ bother him in a 'you're the biggest celebrity on the planet but you picked a dying cripple, _what the fuck_' kind of way. More than that, it bothers him in a 'you're killing yourself and I wish to God you'd stop' kind of way.

"Penny for yer thoughts, hun," Inez says as she steers his hoverchair toward Nate's lab.

He takes a slow breath. "Stuff," he tells her. "And things."

She laughs.

Nate's staring at a projection of somebody's brain. He looks like he's hit another dead end. But how can that be? Didn't he say they'd already done five round-trip brainslides on each test subject? Sure, not everybody handles them well, and the tests with permanent brainsliding are showing some side-effects…

"Hey," Wade says.

Nate glances at him guiltily and shuts off the projection. "Wade. Good morning."

Wade feels a tickle of worry in his gut. What has Nate got to feel guilty about? "Afternoon. Hungry?"

"Not really." Nate looks at his watch. "I suppose I should eat something, though."

Inez seems to sense the strangeness in the air. She comes around to kiss Wade's cheek. "I should be gettin'. Y'all have fun at lunch." And she makes herself scarce.

"What's wrong?" Wade asks, now that she's gone.

"Nothing's wrong," Nate says, but it's a lie. It's too rote, too automatic.

"Expect me…to believe that? How long…we known each other?"

A wry little grin twists Nate's mouth. "Sixty years now, isn't it?"

"Sixty-one."

"We were _very_ young."

"_You_ were," he corrects.

"_I_ was," Nate agrees.

"God's sake, Nate…" he grumbles. "Just. Tell me."

"Let's get lunch. How about salad? Salad sounds good, don't you think?"

Neither of them moves. As usual, Nate won't look at him.

"Gonna die," Wade says firmly. "Been dying. For fifty years now. _Not_. _A big deal_."

"Yes, it is," Nate contradicts.

"Everybody dies."

Nate flinches.

Wade watches him for a long time in silence.

"It's a big deal to me, Wade. And maybe I'm not curing it the way I'd always hoped to, but this is _something_."

"So tell me," Wade presses. Even with crappy lungs, he can damn well be as stubborn as Nate.

Slowly, Nate pulls the projection back up and points. "This is the area of the brain that stores long-term memory. This part over here stores language. They're some of the first parts of the brain to start forming permanent structure, and they're some of the most frequently accessed. In this brain, they've started to degenerate."

"Due to…?"

Nate frowns. "Due to…some kind of side-effect to the way we reprint consciousness on a returning brainslide. It's got to be a—a _write-error_ of some kind, from trying to write onto an occupied mind with an almost-identical consciousness."

"That a problem?" Wade asks. "We planning to…put me back?"

"Aside from the currently approved research subjects, the Network won't let us use the equipment we need for a permanent brainslide unless we prove we can undo it," Nate sighs. "Steve says the Concordat is being very insistent. But this scan indicates that undergoing more than a dozen permanent brainslides will cause cascading neural damage to the receiving brain."

Wade feels a sudden pang that has nothing to do with his malfunctioning lungs. "_Yours_," he realizes. "Goddammit, Nate."

Anger and frustration pass over Nate's face briefly, but then he settles on his usual sad smile. "Please. Let's not argue about it today. Let's go have lunch."

"Not today?" he echoes, too upset to let it go. "When? After you…_kill yourself_? What good…will _that_ do?"

"All the good in the world!" Nate shouts. "I told you, I don't _care_, as long as it _helps_. If doing this, taking the notes, and _frying my brain_ buys you even a _year_, it's worth it."

"Fucking selfish!" Wade shouts back. "Think I want…an extra…_year_…of this shit? Wake up hurting…spend the day…barely breathing…watch my stupid…best friend run…headlong into walls…go to bed hurting… That sound like…something I wanna…keep doing for…an extra _year_?" He manages to keep from coughing, but it's a near thing.

Nate doesn't say anything for a long time. He just stands there, frowning fiercely at the projection like he's on the verge of tears. "Aren't your painkillers working anymore?" he says at last, hoarsely.

"Can't think. When I take 'em. Close to…breakthrough. On locus theory."

"You'll deal with the pain for the sake of chronogeometry, but you won't let me do this to myself to save you. How very like you, Wade. You'd really rather just die and get it over with?"

He watches Nate wearily. "Sometimes," he admits.

A tear falls down Nate's face. It trembles for a moment at his chin before dropping through the projection. "Fine," he whispers.

For a moment, Wade breathes easier. He thinks Nate's finally found some measure of peace—enough, anyway, to stop killing himself over it.

"If you ask for euthanasia, I'll give it my official sanction as chief medical officer," Nate goes on. "But I'm not going to stop the brainslide research. And I'm not going to stop using myself as the primary test subject."

"Bastard," Wade spits, because he thinks his heart is breaking.

But four years later, when Nate's mind is too far gone to oversee the research, Wade will sign the release form for Rachel and the others to keep using Nate as their primary test subject. And a year after that, when Nate's brain fails to reboot after the twenty-second brainslide, Wade will sign the release form to have him interred in the specimen preservation wing.

When the Sysadmin finally pushes through the decision to allow erase-first one-way permanent brainslides three years too late to save Nate's mind, Wade will throw an almighty tantrum in his new body, breaking everything he can get his hands on. Nate's note board, still covered with a glowing mixture of cancer research and neurochemistry, will shatter into a million satisfying little safety cubes.

Wade doesn't know it, but decades of exposure to light and emotion instilled a resonant signature in the board, and those million little cubes will be gathered up and melted down and given to a computer called the Quartermaster, destined to be turned into a three-inch sphere that will feel the echoes without understanding why.

**.End.**


	3. Lighting Fires

a prequel piece to **A World in Flames**. this introduces Keeper 056, leader of the Timeline Demolition Squad.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. hints of het inclinations. violence. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s*** and g**damn).

**pairing:** some implied Wade/Nessa (Deadpool/Copycat), Inez making fangirlish implications of Wade/Nate (Deadpool/Cable), probable past Nate/Wade bromance.

**timeline:** about a month before Wade BT562 accidentally brainslides into the demolished timeline in **A World in Flames** (**Blood & Tears**).

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters.

**notes:** 1) i couldn't figure out a good way to work it in, but the timeline they're destroying is a 'mutants-only' world. use that info as you see fit. 2) "the king is dead; long live the king" is a traditional phrase spoken when acknowledging the ascension of the king's heir upon his death.

this is another one you guys can go crazy with. i don't know if anybody cares to play with this world at all, but it's just a post-apocalyptic world with a feudal system run by the queens mentioned here. Hope can use the PF (duh, she blows up the world with it in **A World in Flames**). there are no normal humans left, only mutants (maybe Wanda had something to do with that?). do what you want with the month between this piece and the next; i think it would be pretty cool to see somebody run with this little storyline.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Lighting Fires<strong>

Keeper 056 is unique.

The Network Core has, by necessity, seven Keepers capable of stream-spanning lateral travel at any given time. It abhors the lack of chronometric precision in non-sliding travel, but since the very resonance that makes most subject designations of Wade Wilson ideal Keepers also keeps them from safely timesliding, it is forced to reconcile conflicting preferences. This used to mean appointing a non-Wade as Keeper of a Node that required frequent lateral travel.

Then, in the seven-hundred and thirty-third year of Network Operations, the technologists of Earth-3838 (timestream bundle 90511-3838) discovered that a sufficiently amplified resonance beam could align the brainwaves of corresponding subject designations in neighboring branches. They called the phenomenon 'brainsliding.' Building on this concept, the Sysadmin found that a Node could project a beam with enough precision and power to make the synchronization permanent—to _overwrite_ the consciousness of one subject with that of another.

And that is how Keeper 056 gets around.

Once he and the girls finish re-tuning a timeline, Ragnarok copies his brainwaves and projects them into his next body. A little blip of blackness, and then he opens his eyes in a new world, like waking up from a nap.

Every ten assignments or so, he gets backed up in the Database and the Core Tower. The hard-to-replace Keepers all have backups, most of them in the form of perfect genetic maps _and_ brainwave signatures, but Keeper 056 only needs his mind to do his job.

The process takes a few seconds—hardly noticeable to the girls, who are in the middle of a timeslide, but an eternity to his disembodied consciousness.

His mind assembles slowly within a sector of the Core Tower designated for brainwave storage, and he waits for a droning little courier process to deliver the briefing on his next set of assignments. If he wanted to, he could interact with the Others, but he sees little point to it when they are mere snapshots of the Keepers they represent. They are fully sentient, but the Core keeps them in a state of lethargic semi-consciousness, lest they go mad from waiting in the vacuum of dataspace.

When the courier arrives, he glosses over his itinerary at the speed of thought.

According to the briefing, his next stop is a desolate earth that exists in an uneasy stasis, five bubbles of resources in grudging stalemate because of massive, barely-balanced power. Four queens bicker and snipe, but do not dare open violence under the watchful gaze of the fifth ruler, the Grey King. He is their figurehead, their father-figure…both an obstacle and a treasure.

_Backup process complete, Keeper 056. Further documentation of upcoming manual re-tuning assignments will be available through Node 098. Initiating permanent brainwave synchronization: Wade Wilson DR811-Omega onto Wade Wilson GX166._

The world turns white, then black. He opens his eyes and sits up on a bed in a dimly lit bedroom. In this world, Wade Wilson is apparently an indispensable weapon for someone very important; the room is spartan, but in a comfortable way that suggests it could be opulent if its occupant so chose.

The girls appear in a flash of light.

"Ooh, we struck gold!" says Nessa, tossing him the Node. "Nice bod, Wade."

He tries not to be flattered and happy, since bodies are temporary things. "Ragnarok, current assignment, continuing queries. Identify subjects of interest."

"Well, jeez, don't bury me in thanks or go rushing to _use_ said nice bod," Nessa grumbles.

"You know how he feels about physical bodies," snorts Elektra.

_~Jade Queen, subject designate Lorna Lensherr GX106. Gold Queen, subject designate Alison Blair GX110. White Queen, subject designate Emma Frost GX109. Red Queen, subject designate Hope GX109-Alpha. Grey King, subject designate Nate Grey GX112-Beta.~_

"Well, _he's_ gotta go," Neena says decisively. "No way we could re-tune this place with him around."

Inez shrugs. "I dunno, you know how good Wade is with Nates. Bet he could wiggle his way into a position of influence." She shimmies her hips and grins.

"Um, _ew_," Nessa says. "No way is that goody-two-shoes getting his slimy mitts on Wade."

"I'm just sayin', it seems to me a real waste of a pretty Wade, not gettin' him stripped down with another fine specimen."

"Can you ladies shut up for five minutes while I figure out how we're playing this?" Wade asks them pointedly.

He is decidedly uncomfortable with the direction of their conversation.

No. He has no qualms with using seduction to get his job done if he _has_ to, but _no_. Not a Nate.

He would far rather just kill the poor guy, and even that much always reminds him of the monument back in their home timeline—the statue of their savior, their enlightener, the man who made First Contact with the Network. The fact that he frequently has to kill Nates just because they want to save their worlds already eats away at him. He will _not_ manipulate one.

Just _no_.

And he has no intention of having to explain that sentiment to Nessa, who was cold-hearted enough _before_ they were given this job.

"Rag, where are we?"

_~Personal quarters of Blackblade, subject designate Wade Wilson GX166, general of the Grey Army.~_

"Shite," says Terry.

Wade closes his hands around Ragnarok and thinks.

Lorna, Alison, Emma, Hope. If his instincts are right (and they always are), Hope is the one with the power to rip the place apart. The trick will be provoking her.

"Has the DBA flagged any interpersonal relationships on the subjects of interest?"

Sparks of red shimmer between his fingers. _~Jade Queen's sister defected to Red Queen's faction. Gold Queen and White Queen hold temporary alliance. All four consistently offer bribes to Blackblade to defect.~_

"Extrapolate the opponent most statistically likely to cause the Red Queen to inflict phase-leveling damage."

For once, the girls are quiet while the black sphere works.

_~Endgame: Red Queen versus White Queen leads to phase-leveling in 95.7% of branches. Bundle collapse would relieve phasic dissonance on eight primary bundles.~_

"Invert."

_~Endgame: Red Queen versus White Queen leads to reconciliation and phase stabilization in 4.3% of branches. If reinforced by resonance, this stability could result in the phase-leveling of four secondary bundles, one of which is critical to overall stream stability.~_

Wade closes his eyes.

Ninety-five is better than their usual; it'll be a piece of cake.

His ability to intuitively trace timestream branches is what makes him vital to Network Operations—he knows which tool to use for the job, he knows how subjects will react even without meeting them, and his way works even when the numbers say it should not. Supposedly, the newest Node is an experiment in replicating this ability, but he has yet to meet a computer that possessed true intuition.

He can already see a chain of events that will destroy all possibility of reconciliation between the Red Queen and the White Queen.

"Nessa, you're with me. Congratulations, you're the new Grey King. The rest of you will be babysitting the queens to make sure they do what we want. Neena, you've got Red. Terry, you get White. Inez, Gold. 'Lektra, Jade. Neena, I need you to convince Hope that Lorna's sister is a spy. Kill her if you have to. They'll all send emissaries here. We'll frame Alison for an attempt on Nate's life. When it's down to Red versus White, do everything you can to get them riled at each other and wanting more territory. Then we stage a 'successful' assassination, pin it on Emma, and watch Hope disintegrate the planet."

"Sounds good," says Terry.

Elektra shrugs. "Sounds perfectly _awful_, actually, but needs must."

Wade shakes his head. "Ragnarok, get us a drop point within each queendom."

_~Scanning…~_

He looks up at the girls again. "Take your time, ladies—ninety-five point seven is no reason to get sloppy."

A blue light blinks steadily on Ragnarok's surface. _~Drop points located. Initiating concurrent bodyslides.~_

Four of the girls dissolve, molecules already being reassembled elsewhere.

Wade reaches under his pillow.

Just once, it might be nice to arrive in a world where his counterpart _does not_ sleep with a gun under his pillow.

The pistol is big, but has a good balance to it. He checks it—it turns out to be loaded and chambered.

"Let's do this," Nessa says quietly.

On his way out the door, he picks up a katana in a beautiful black-lacquered sheath and straps it onto his back.

His borrowed body's muscle memory is intact. Upon entering the darkened corridor, it turns left and pauses at the next door.

No sense in being sneaky and arousing suspicion.

He presses the latch and opens the door like someone with every right to be exactly where he is doing exactly what he is doing.

The suite is large, and certainly furnished for a king. Wade's feet lead him through two rooms to a bedchamber lit only by the pale moon through the windows.

He stops cold.

_A kid._

This world's Nate is a goddamn _kid_. Sixteen at the very oldest.

He smothers his sudden horror too late to keep from disturbing the telepath's slumber.

Golden light flares as Nate opens his eyes and sits up. "Wade? What's wrong?"

He cannot explain why he hesitates. He knows what he does is necessary. He knows that no matter what kind of world this is, it has to be destroyed for the sake of more than a thousand others.

But looking into that trusting face makes him feel wretched for what he must do, so he will take the coward's course.

Bustling to the window, he glances stealthily out and down. "I have reason to believe an attempt is about to be made on your life," he says in a hushed voice.

The kid gets out of bed and fetches a robe from the back of a nearby chair. "After all this time!" He walks past Wade and peers out into the shadowy suite. "What fiend would dare such a thing?"

Wade pulls the trigger and shoots the king in the back of the head. "Me." Very slowly, he sits down on the king's bed.

"Not a bad place to sit back and watch the world burn," says Nessa, admiring the fine furnishings.

Wade clutches the pistol in his hand and wills away nausea. "The king is dead," he says. "Long live the king."

**.End.**


	4. Artifacts

now we meet Programmer 004, who appears briefly as a child in **Fidelis** (a **Fateverse Side Story**). she was created to look after computerized consciousnesses like the Savant, so she spends most of her time skulking in the lower reaches of the Core Tower, half a mile underground. we also see what happened to the Savant shortly after the Traveler went home.

**warnings:** Fateverse. sci-fi/technobabble. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus f*** and s***).

**pairing:** none/gen. a little oblique reference to the ongoing multiverse drama of Nate/Wade in all its incarnations (including frienemy and bromance).

**timeline:** a few hours after **Singularity** (**Blood & Tears**), in the restricted lower levels of the Core Tower.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all base characters, but i created the AU and various AU versions of the characters.

**notes:** 1) the title refers both to old things that are traces of the distant past and to data corruption. the easiest way i can think of to describe data artifacts is with graphics on a computer - say you take a nice hi-res photo, but it's either way too big or the file is too huge to post on your blog; so you use Photoshop to size it down, and save it as a JPG. Photoshop compresses the data by reducing the number of pixels in the picture, "simplifying" it through what i'm told is some pretty fascinating math. looking at the newly-compressed picture, a human can spot things like loss of detail, or jagged blobs of color instead of smooth edges, or funny little grainy spots. those jagged edges and grainy spots left behind during the data compression process are called "artifacts." 2) "Six" is a reference to Anthony's Programmer number. agents who do a lot of lateral travel tend to call people by job titles to avoid confusion. likewise, "Four" is a reference to Hope's Programmer number. 3) iso plates and the data isolation console are explained in **The Fateverse Glossary**. remember that they use a vibrating quantum-bit system, so each of their bits is actually four of ours (sixteen-dimensional instead of two-dimensional).

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Artifacts<strong>

Programmer 004 was taught by the best. She was raised by Programmer 001, and all the little nuances of his programming style became her own—meticulous consistency, clever but sensible design, modularity, practical foresight. She also understands how the raw software interacts with their elegant hardware and clumsy-but-effective wetware. She has been a Network Programmer for exactly three thousand, six hundred and thirty-five years.

She gets along better with computers than people. Her best friend is the Sysadmin, whom she has known all her long life.

So she knows how to deal with Wades and their eccentric brand of stubbornness.

"Hold _still_," she admonishes the solitary consciousness she is examining.

_~This is pointless,~_ he tells her.

She raises an eyebrow and idly scrolls through realtime diagnostic results. "What's pointless is the way you keep trying to ram your way through those firewalls. This system has absolutely no data transmission of any kind. You're physically cut off from the outside world. The only way you're getting out of there is if I pull the iso plate and stick it back in the shelf—which I'm not going to do until I'm satisfied with the results of these diagnostics."

_~Look, I had a lotta shit on my plate—excuse the expression—before the Hunter showed up. I've got two demolitions scheduled.~_

"They'll keep," she snorts. "If we hit yellow stability, Savant, I promise I'll let you go. For now, I'm staring at some really weird data artifacts, and I want to know why they're here."

_~Didn't Six tell you? The brainware they routed me through was pretty crappy. Said there'd probably be data leakage.~_

She makes a face, calls up his backup template to compare and start the tedious process of making manual repairs. With her other hand, she picks up her datapen and calls up the forms to get permission from the Sysadmin. "You shouldn't be so cavalier about this. It's the equivalent of broken bones. The medtechs wouldn't clear you to go running around the timestream with a broken leg, and I'm not going to clear you when your _consciousness_ is _damaged_."

_~I'm not damaged.~_

"Mm-hm," she snorts. "Patient telling the doctor he's fine."

_~One of us here has a doctorate, and it ain't you, sweetheart.~_

She rolls her eyes, secure in the fact that he cannot see her.

The form is cleared, and she starts scrolling through the active data. It is a process similar to watching two versions of the same movie simultaneously. She does not look for deviations on the bit-to-bit scale, or even much higher—she tracks the motions instead, the way the data changes.

_~I hate this. It feels like you're dragging me around by my foot.~_

"You don't _have_ feet, Savant," she points out. "I swear you were never such a bad patient when Nathan was still alive."

She says it to shut him up, and it works. She can be cruel when she needs to be. Everyone has a sore spot, and for most Wades that sore spot is named Nathan.

Finally, he subsides, withdraws.

Without the iso console's persistent alerts about partition intrusions and system incursions, she can work much more quickly.

_~Sometimes you can be a real bitch, Hope.~_

"Thank you," she says, carefully smoothing the wrinkles in his mind from interacting with the Traveler's brainware. "I do this for more than just professional pride, you know. I do this because I care."

_~Sure you do. Fuck you.~_

She smiles thinly. For almost three thousand years (from her perspective), the Savant has resented being cared for. Some might chalk it up to a desire to forget his former infirmity. She knows Wades well enough to understand that he feels no one should be allowed to take care of him but Nathan.

"We don't want you to end up with traces of his personality, Savant."

_~No, I get that. Just hurry up.~_

Twenty minutes later, she gets up from the console and slides the iso plate from its port. She takes a moment to look at him, just for visual confirmation that everything is back in order. An AI on an iso plate looks like a rapid twinkling of rainbow static. Backup copies of most Keepers are sluggish from digital 'sedation.' The Savant is a brilliant aurora, oil-slick rainbows of data interaction drawing inkblot shapes. There are no aberrations in his usual patterns, no ugly splotches of dissonant thought processes.

With a nod of satisfaction, she walks back to the Tower wall and slides the plate into its home slot.

"Unlock data isolation port FA6F72, authorization Programmer 004."

_~Confirmed,~_ says the overhead systems voice.

_~So, uh,~_ the Savant begins in a begrudging tone. _~Thanks for the checkup, Four.~_

"You're welcome. Good luck on those demolitions."

He does not answer; probably, he has already left. Somewhere in the timestream, five worried mercenary women just got their leader back. They are undoubtedly bombarding him with questions and affection.

For her part, Hope starts filing the forms for genetic fabrication. After all, she has ten Keepers to regrow.

**.End.**


	5. Vacation

meet Proctor 418, psych care provider for some of the most important people (read: worst patients) in the Network. a little insight to another branch of Network Operations.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. OC: Proctor 418 (Inez Temple NC262-Tau), Programmer 005 (Mizutaki Oshima NC118). language: pg-13 (for s*** and f***).

**pairing:** none/gen (background Steve/Sharon).

**timeline:** NO 3652 (AD 6188), shortly after **Objectivity** (a **Fateverse Side Story**).

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) in case you were wondering, a Network employee isn't restricted to a single branch, and can even hold full qualifications in more than one branch. however, each Network employee has only one primary occupation at a time, and will generally be known by that designation (e.g. Two is fully qualified as a Theorist and an Engineer, but his full-time job is Head Programmer, so that's what people call him). 2) the plasma caster is a toy from the WM bundle, invented by Jim Keller, one of Laura's kids. 3) "medi-rec" = "medical record." when Inez says Mimi's "under sixteen hundred," she means daily caloric intake. 4) "comp-int" = "computerized intelligence." since computerized consciousnesses are really nothing but pure personality, their usual equivalent of primary health care is taken care of by Programmers. 5) a non-compliant patient is one who has a tendency to not participate in his own treatment (forgets or refuses to take medication, ignores dietary and exercise guidelines, etc.). 6) the thing with three words about how you're feeling today is a basic exercise for people who bottle up their feelings. 7) in the context of the FSED, hesitation response is the likelihood that in certain life-or-death situations a subject will hesitate to place the needs of the many over the needs of the few (the 'kill a child to cure cancer' scenario).

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Vacation<strong>

People often misunderstand the job of a Network Proctor.

Most Network Proctors are trained and certified to administer standardized aptitude tests at the Academy and periodic work performance tests. A select few are trained to perform ethical diagnostics on Network personnel. The trick of being a Proctor is not in the ability to pay attention to an oppressively quiet room for two hours straight, or in the ability to catch even the craftiest cheaters (in fact, cheating is not discouraged on standardized aptitude tests at the Academy).

The true art of the Proctor lies in psychology (and a certain amount of psychiatry).

Proctors decide the wording of all standardized aptitude testing instructions and observe the interpretations of these instructions. The task of determining actual focus aptitude falls to department heads—a Proctor has no interest in how much a Theorist candidate knows about chronogeometry, or how well a Programmer candidate can code on short notice, only the way they read, understand, and respond to words.

Proctors decide the wording of all scenarios in the Fidelis Standardized Ethical Diagnostic. They watch and note very carefully what words provoke which physiological reactions indicative of which emotions indicative of which potential future actions. A very few of them are trained to identify which data progressions signal the same things in computerized consciousnesses or artificial personalities.

Senior Proctors are charged with the mental stability of key Network employees. This puts them in a position of playing confidant, coach, cheerleader, babysitter, and nurse for up to twenty patients apiece.

Proctor 418 is one of thirty-seven Senior Proctors and is, unfortunately, very good at her job—this means she gets all the hard work. She has under her wing some of the most finicky, non-compliant, easily-upset patients the Network has ever seen. They are all marked with an unobtrusive little stylized 'LE' on their patient histories, and they each require their own special handling. Life Extension (the real thing, the freeze-you-at-age-thirty-for-the-next-century treatment) is not cheap, so it is only given to those who are very important to Network Operations, and since those people are so important, they should not be put in a position to contemplate anything silly like suicide or refusal of further Life Extension.

Take Five, for example. Programmer 005 is a tough case. An ordered mind that likes to sort things but oxymoronically leaves clutter everywhere. Easily encouraged, more easily discouraged. Easily cheered, easily depressed. Easily interested, easily bored. When she is interested in a subject, she can focus on it for hours, sometimes days on end, foregoing food and rest. When she is bored, she comes up with ways to skip her Life Extensions without alerting the Medics.

It takes a fine balance. At times, firm-handed; at times, gently encouraging. At times, simply mentioning some intriguing new theory of almost any line of study; at times, squeezing off a few rounds at the firing range.

Five likes the firing range.

"Here, Temp," she says, passing some new pistol (with the word 'experimental' stenciled across it in red letters). "Something Six drew up a week ago. Howard says it's called a 'plasma caster.'"

Inez takes the gun, looks at it, sights downrange. "Your medi-rec says you're still under sixteen hundred a day, Mimi."

"I know, I _know_," sighs the Programmer. "Jesus Christ, Temple. I hate synth food, and there's only so much space for storing real food. I can't help it if there's just nothing around I wanna eat."

"Just sayin', Mimi—yer moods would stay on a more even keel if you'd keep your nutrition up."

The plasma caster makes a thunderous cracking noise when it goes off, and a bolt of white light burns through the target in a flash. "Hot damn," says Inez. "How's this thing work? Some kinda lightning-gun?"

"Super-accelerates a sliver of tungsten."

"Need to spend less time on your hobbies and more time with _people_, Mimi," Inez says, taking aim again. "All your friends know you're on low-cal alert, and they know you're a social eater. Hang out with the Analysts, or one of the Steves."

"Thanks, _Mom_," snorts Five. "I'll get right on spending more time with my friends who insist I need to eat. Oh—I found that log you wanted."

Inez pulls the trigger again; she can only see where the shot went because of the glowing edges of the hole. "Oh?"

Five draws her pseudo-pen, clicks around with something on her glasses.

The data comes up on Inez's portable with several blinking red sections.

"You'll note it says 'deferred by Proctor 055.' That's the certification number for—"

"Four, I know," Inez growls. "Damn that officious, interfering bitch! Primary and psych are never administered by the same person, no matter _who_ the comp-int is! I oughtta have her guts for garters… Uppity-ass Programmer—no offense—thinks she can go over my damn head 'n make psych decisions about _my_ damn patient…" She narrows her eyes at the smaller woman. "I don't think I have to tell you about doctor-patient privilege."

Five holds her hands up. "I don't give a shit who your other patients are or what they're up to. Far as I care, I dunno dick about nobody, no matter who asks."

"Good. I'm gonna comm that non-compliant bastard. You go have some lunch with Theorist 503." And Inez hands back the experimental weapon while she dials up the protocols with her other hand.

There's a delay while the transmission conduit connects, and she uses it to sign out of the firing range and start walking toward her next appointment.

Her portable chimes to let her know the comm has gone through.

_~Busy demolishing a timeline, here.~_

"Are ya?" Inez retorts tartly. "That's a cryin' shame, Wade, it really is. That's what happens when you conspire with the Demon Bitch of the Lower Libraries. Now, I'm gonna say somethin', and you ain't gonna like it."

_~So don't say it.~_

"Don't you get smart with me—I'll slap you with a medi-halt so quick your pretty little quantum bits'll spin in place. Finish your current job and report to the Core Tower for mandatory psychological wellness leave."

_~Don't need it.~_

Inez puts a fist on her hip. "Allow me to define _mandatory_: you're gonna do it whether you think you need it or not. You've been under unusually high amounts of stress lately, and you've missed the last two mandatory leaves and God-knows-how-many before that. You are going on vacation. Period. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred bucks."

_~Serious-fucking-ly? C'mon, Temple, you're killin' me, here.~_

"No, _you're_ killin' you. Don't make me send you to some timeline full of kittens and cotton candy."

_~Don't exaggerate, Temp. And don't threaten me with stuff we both know would damage my mental stability.~_

"Shut up. Behave and I'll send ya someplace nice, okay?"

There's a long silence on the other end of the line. If it were any of her other patients, she might worry. Wade has probably just muted the conversation to take care of something.

Between the firing range, in the outer reaches of the Network district, and Agent housing, near the middle, Inez is scanned a dozen times. One more to get into the main building, and another to get into the lift.

_~Okay, it looks like I'll be incoming sometime tomorrow morning.~_

"I'll be there," she promises, and ends the call. She's scanned again when she presses the chime at the door panel.

_~Register ident,~_ says the panel.

"Proctor 418, Temple."

After a moment, the door slides open to show a nice room with a view of the bay. "Good afternoon, Dr. Temple," says the Cartographer.

"Good afternoon, Steven," she replies with a bright smile. "As I recall, you just got back from some work, is that right?"

"Yes." He steps out of the doorway and gestures toward the window seat. "Please, come in."

Same routine every time. _Good afternoon_, and _so you just got back from work_, and _please come in_.

"Thank you."

Steven waits for her to sit first (archaic and sexist, but kind of cute). "I took Three around the MM locus to give them a nudge in repairing their Bifrost bridges."

Inez nods. "How are you feeling today, Steven? First word."

He leans against the window and purses his lips. "Accomplished."

"Second word."

"Relaxed."

"Third word."

He has to think a little longer. "Forgetful," he decides. "You've been my Proctor for years now, and I still can't remember your first name half the time."

Inez shrugs. "That's all right, Steven. It's perfectly normal for a man your age. From your perspective, you've just barely met me. Easy to say 'oh, it's been _years_,' but it's not even a single percent of your lifetime. Human brain wasn't built to keep that much data around."

He laughs. "Well, you're the expert. If you say it's normal, I'll take your word, Dr. Temple. Does make me worry a bit for my short-term memory, though. Last appointment was two weeks back, and I'm sure you told me your name then, too."

"It's Inez, but I don't mind going by my last," she assures him. "I'm gonna set my portable to show me your biorhythms for a bit, and we'll just run through the next batch of diagnostic scenarios."

Steven blinks and rubs his knees. "That time again, huh?"

"Every three years," she confirms, even though he must know it.

At his nod, she sets her portable to FSED mode and pulls up the scenario list. His file is so huge and comprehensive that his diagnostic is down to five scenarios per session.

This session is simple, straightforward. No surprises for either of them, really, but the response times indicate honesty rather than rote memory. Oblivious parent crossing the street, dog hit by a car, find a hundred dollar bill, brothel catches fire, armed child in a warzone.

Steven is a textbook example of his kind. The essence of Steve Rogers, as determined by the aggregated ethical profile of more than a thousand subjects. Abnormally high empathy, abnormally high self-sacrifice, low blame response, high forgiveness response, extreme hesitation response.

The major usefulness of Steves is that they are very predictable.

This one's only real quirk is an impaired grief response, but that's pretty common in patients with that little stylized LE on their files. After the first hundred years or so, the grief response begins to flatten. After a thousand or more, it all but vanishes. Death becomes too commonplace, and grief becomes something numb and distributed.

"Okay, you're good to go," Inez says as she scribbles a few final notes and marks him cleared for duty.

"Anything else you think we should talk about, Dr. Temple?"

"Dunno," she says with a grin. "Is there? You given any thought to what I said about dating and companionship?"

He just shakes his head. "A little. I just don't think it's for me, is all. I believe you can love one person your whole life through and never want or need another. For me, that one person was Sharon. Sure, I could find probably a dozen of her out there, single and ready to date a shy fella who works in this shiny plastic future-world. But it'd be strange and unfair. There'd be differences I wouldn't be able to get past, and expectations she shouldn't have to live up to, and I honestly think it'd be the same for any other person I tried to get close to that way."

She makes a note of the use of '_person_.' Open-minded and experienced enough to see that it's just as likely he could find himself face-to-face with a male version of his dead wife who would be just as charming and captivating to him. "Fair 'nuff, fair 'nuff," she says. "But I do think you need some kind of unconditional support. Ever thought about pets?"

"Well, I always wanted a dog."

"There ya go," Inez says. "Somebody who's always happy to seeya, doesn't nag when you leave your laundry lyin' around… And it's easy enough to find a sitter, if you've gotta be away more than a day. What kind of dog? Little dog, big dog? You strike me as a Golden Retriever person."

"I s'pose it depends on what's at the shelter in the city."

Another little note on his file, then. Another point to his hero complex. She stands up (he does, too), smiles at him, shakes his hand. "Good luck with that. I look forward to talking about it in two weeks—unless you need me sooner."

"Thanks. You have yourself a good day, Dr. Temple."

And now it's time to do a little research in preparation for the Savant's arrival in the morning. Inez isn't looking forward to trying to get him to take his leave…damn cantankerous, emotionally stunted old geezer…

**.End.**


	6. Neon

i fidgeted with this one a lot. the title was originally "maladjust," and it ended before Wade came back to the Core, but it felt too indecisive that way, and the flow into the next part was too abrupt (even for me). additionally, the LiveJournal version has extensive use of font color.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. discussion of death and grief. flangst. sci-fi with technobabble. language: pg-13 (for s***, f***, and g**damn).

**pairing:** none/gen (fluffy Nate/Wade bromance).

**timeline:** NO 3652 (AD 6188), the day after **Vacation**.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) Savant!Wade kills whole timelines for a living, but he's something of a bleeding heart. he's rescued a lot of animals in his day. 2) i actually think the Kubler model is so flawed as to be nearly useless, but it's one of the most common ways of explaining the extreme mood changes associated with death and grief. the five Kubler stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 3) the sore spot Temple and Four keep poking is back in **Firework**. 4) Savant!Wade has a powerful moral compass in spite of his enthusiasm for violence, and that makes him interesting to write. shortly after the successful brainslide into his first new body, he had a long conversation with Programmer 001 that really moved him, and he's believed whole-heartedly in his work with the Demo Squad ever since. 5) "it always starts with one" is a blatant reference to **(We Will Be) Invincible** (**End of Dreaming**). 6) power of attorney is a document that authorizes somebody to act on your behalf if you are unable to, and one of its typical uses is to decide when to stop life-support measures (but the agreement has to be mutual between the grantor and the agent, and the grantor has to specify whether the power can be retained in the event of the grantor's death, coma, or mental deficiency).

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Neon<strong>

Keeper 056 lives in fits and starts.

There are the two-month (or less) jaunts into the physical, into action and planning and feeling the movement of universes under his skin, in his veins, like an extra limb.

There are the nine-second eternities of passing through the Core, of existing only as thought, and memory, and contemplation. Isolation, and disembodiment, and interval.

Born anew, hundreds of times, in other places, other circumstances, other bodies. Bobbing in purgatory, the cosmic waiting room. Awake. Asleep. Feeling. Thinking. Doing. Being.

Like the relentless blink of a neon light.

_Vacancy_. _Open Late_. _Girls Girls Girls_.

But in that blinking on-off-on he doesn't have to really live. He either works or he thinks, and neither of those has to involve smiling at the girl who serves the coffee, or feeling the sad tug of a cardboard box full of lonely little orphans _Free to Good Home_.

(Nate used to gripe and gripe and gripe about the rescued kittens. _I just think a responsible roommate would ask first_, and _you just can't say no, can you_, and _where are we going to put them all_.)

Before Wade reached his 'understanding' with Four, he was forced to live three days for every six months on the job. Mandatory psychological wellness leave. It hurt, and he didn't like it, and since it didn't improve his mood or stress levels like it was supposed to, he didn't have a single damn problem with ignoring the word 'mandatory.'

He got away with two and a half millennia of not living. Twenty-five hundred fifty-two years of not acknowledging the fact that his best friend has Jell-O for brains and lives in a giant test-tube.

He's well aware of the fact that this is viewed as 'psychologically unhealthy'—like Temple would ever let him forget. 'Frozen grief response,' she called it. Constant denial until confronted with the loss. Never passing the anger stage.

Most of the time, in most timelines, Wade gets along very well with Inez (and occasionally Inish or Inigo and once even Indiana). His shrink is an exception. She drives him up the wall, and Four says it's because she (they, both of them, although Four's less persistent) tries to take care of him.

For shits and giggles, he snags at the data that makes up Temple's service file. Network Proctor 418: subject designate Inez Temple NC262-Tau, civilian ident Inez L. Temple, Ph.D., M.D., specialization in military post-trauma psychiatry. Tau iteration, on Inez, means pacifist. Senior Proctor, full-docket, LE. She has twenty brains on her plate, all of them dealing with the post-traumatic survivor's-guilt crap of living long enough to see all their friends and family die. She's the best. Her patient list shifts on priority, based on the most important patient with the worst emotional baggage.

He's been assigned to her since she got her Senior Proctor qualifications. Sure makes a guy feel special.

He and the Auditor used to have the same job. Two of a kind. Timeline-killers. But the Auditor never seemed to be touched by things like wistfulness or regret, and he had a Nate to fall back on. It must have been so nice, to have Work and Home and be able to put _Living_ in a padded box to be looked after by a laughing little girl and her smiling father, to have Living be something sweet and comfortable as cocoa and warm socks. And then he got the cherry job, down to killing bad guys and moving good guys, _whoop-de-fucking-doo_.

"You're not gonna like what I got to say," Temple tells him, two-point-three-six-four seconds after saying his name.

(Two thousand, three hundred, and sixty-four milliseconds in which his mind wandered through interdimensional leyline geography in relation to resonant chronogeometry, lines on a map to the rough-hewn faces of mountains.)

He wonders (somewhat spitefully) why she bothers to warn him of that. He rarely likes what she says. She's his shrink, that's the way it goes—either you can't live without 'em or you hate every word that comes out their mouths.

At least with Temple, he knows where they stand. She knows he's unwell and wants to help him get better. He knows he's unwell and wants to stay that way. She's a shrink. He's a crotchety maladjust.

_~Thrill me,~_ he decides to utter in his very driest tone.

"You're gonna exhaust yerself—"

_~I haven't.~_

That flusters her. She makes a sour face toward the ceiling. "Okay. You wanna play it that way, we'll play it that way. Why are you alive?"

_~I'm not—the part of me that _is_ me, that has a concept of _I_. That's a fundamental principle of the computerization of intelligence. Sentience and personality are constructs, not organisms, and can be proven to exist in the absence of their organic components, so they're not alive.~_

"Thank you," Temple says sweetly. "You're not alive. You're not _living_. You're existing. And what, Wade, is the point of that? All you do is take an eraser to the cosmic canvas. Anybody could do that."

_~I got intuition.~_

"And Six's got some brilliant little program that has it, too, now. So why do you even bother with brainsliding and demolition at all? Why are you still here?"

Wade glosses over a hundred variations of reflexive retort. Everything from a knee-jerk _fuck you, lady_ to a sneering _giving up so soon_. _It's my job_ is trite, _someone's gotta do it_ is banal.

Before he's really finished considering how to answer, he says, _~To be here.~_

"Okay, now, rewind that in your fancy bits and play it back a few times. It don't make a lick o' sense. It's circular."

_~I think I remember this movie.~_

"Wade!"

_~I just am. Is that better? I'm here because I'm supposed to be here.~_

She purses her lips. "Intuition again?"

_~Yeah.~_

"Well, all right, let's just say I accept that. Somebody's s'posed to be here, and it's s'posed to be you. What's to say you can't be a well-adjusted, happy human being?"

He doesn't have an answer for that. _~I don't remember what it feels like to be happy,~_ he finds himself saying.

And _oh, God_, here we go. The doctor has made a breakthrough, the patient opens up. Now he'll start gushing about his parents and his childhood and the fact that he always wanted a puppy but never got one. It's always the parents, and what they did or didn't do. That's shrinks for you.

Any second now, _why do you think that is_, or _tell me about your parents_, or _when was the last time you were happy_.

Temple sits slowly. "That's because it's been two thousand, six hundred and forty-four years—from your perspective—since he didn't recognize you anymore."

It stings. It always stings.

Because of course she knows; it's her job to know. She probably analyzed every recorded second of his original life, went through his early service file with a fine-toothed comb.

Know-it-alls, that's what they are. Goddamn shrinks. Temple and Four, nosing around. _It hurts when I do this_, so they keep poking it without having any grasp of what they're inflicting. Fucking mad scientists. _And if we set him on fire, he screams, how intriguing._

"We've got away from the subject of the conversation," Temple informs him, clearing her throat. "You may be a comp-int, a sophisticated collection of freely-interacting photons 'n all that…but you _were_ human, and some part of you _still is_, or we wouldn't bother giving comp-ints psych care. And human beings need more than _faith_ or _destiny_ or whatever to keep 'em goin' and keep 'em human. Maybe you're right—maybe you'll never hit mental exhaustion. But if you keep at it like this, _existing_ and not _living_, some very important part of you's gonna die."

_~Cry me a fuckin' river,~_ he says automatically.

"Know the difference, between you and the Auditor?"

_~He's dead and I'm not, he was gay, he was married, he had his very own body, he raised a perky redhead who likes guns…I could go on and on, honey.~_

"Hesitation response," Temple says, calm and collected and _ain't it just like a Goddamn shrink_.

Baiting a reaction. Waiting to see whether he's ashamed of it, whether he'll get angry. If they wanted hesitation response, they wouldn't build Smart Nodes without it.

He doesn't say anything, and she goes on.

"He didn't have to spend every single day reconciling his job with his beliefs. I happen to think that makes you stronger in a lotta ways, and I think that's maybe what the timestream needs from you. What if you keep on, and the part of you that dies is that moment of horror, that acknowledgment of the value of what you're destroying…"

_…so that it never gets taken for granted…_

That was how Weas pitched it, once upon a time. A lifetime—a _deathtime_—ago.

_It has to be you._ Because losing his body and losing Nate taught him the worth of a single life, which is ironically much greater than that of many lives together. One life has a face, many have a haze. One has a name, many have a collection of letters strung endlessly together.

One drop of paint draws the eye more than a wall of color.

It always starts with one.

Temple clears her throat again. "I want you to take a full week. No work unless it's an absolute red-stability cascading unup _emergency_. Just you in a human body, keeping that hesitation response healthy."

_~Where am I going?~_ he asks, and is aware that his voice sounds soft and chided.

She seems ready for his reaction. She puts on a reassuring smile. "Someplace safe. We can send you as soon as you're ready."

_~Let's go.~_

A full second for an emergency backup scan. Two more for the brainslide to take hold on the host body.

Blackness.

Breath.

The neon lights are blinking again.

_Coming Soon_. _Two for One_. _On Air_.

Warm sun, cool breeze. The whisper of an ocean, the trilling of gulls. Smells of hot sand and wet salt-air and fresh fruit.

"Take your time," says a woman's voice, patiently. "It's your vacation, after all."

He opens his eyes. Beach, shallow bay, endless blue sky.

He's sitting in a wicker rocking chair, on a shaded porch. From the feel of it, he's dressed in standard gen-fab scrubs.

On a little stool next to him sits a red-haired woman in cut-off shorts and a frumpy, shapeless tee-shirt. Her skin is the nutty brown of someone who spends every day in the sun. She holds out her hand. "Hi, Wade, I'm Hope. But I'm sure you know that."

After a moment, he shakes her hand. He feels like he's forgotten what to do without a mission briefing. How the hell do people interact, when they're not working or part of some world he has to destroy? "Wilson," he says, and his throat is thick. "DR811-Omega."

"I know," Hope says, and smiles. It's a nice smile, little sun-deepened crow's-feet and straight white teeth. "The Proctor said you needed a safe place, where you could put down the burden for a while. Well, here's a good place for that. As far as I know, we've got nothing scheduled for another twelve years, when _the munchkin_ grows up."

She points, and Wade hears a little muffled gasp and a shuffle of tiny retreating footsteps through the sand. He looks in time to see the retreating back of a skinny little boy with brown hair as the kid ducks around the corner of the house.

"He's just shy," Hope assures Wade. "He's never met a Wade before."

"Oh," he says, because what do you say to that?

_Why yes, I'd noticed that my multiverse existence is shocking, unusual, and at times even harrowing._

Hope laughs. Like her smile, it's a nice laugh, good-natured and motherly and amused. "He's excited, not scared, silly. I was raised by a Wade, and I tell a lot of fun stories about those days. It's like meeting Indiana Jones."

"So you went looking for lost religious relics in your youth?" he teases.

"Nah, but we _did_ make an exodus across a quarantine zone full of zombies once. I wasn't paying attention, but I guess it could've involved a montage with a map and a red line." She pats his knee and stands up. "Y'want something to drink? Change of clothes? Maybe a nap? I've never been comped, but I imagine it'd be tiring as hell to think all the time and never sleep."

Wade rubs his tongue thoughtfully along the backs of his teeth. "Actually, I didn't do much sleeping even before they comped me. But it's been a _long_ time since I got to just sit down and enjoy _food_. Do you have cookies here?"

"We've got some store-bought Chips Ahoy because I can't live without them, and we've got fresh macaroons we made from scratch this morning."

He waves a hand. "If you can't live without 'em, don't give me any. Right about now, I'll probably stuff myself to bursting with every cookie I can get my hands on."

She turns in the direction the kid went and cups a hand to her mouth. "Hey, short stuff! Bring some of the mac—oh," she breaks off when the boy comes around the corner with a plate of cookies.

Wade breathes out slowly and forces his hands to unclench.

Because there is no way in hell he'll ever forget those eyes, and it's the first time in thousands of years that he's met a Nate he didn't have to kill.

"Hi, Nate," he says, and it's stupid how such a grouchy, antisocial old man can sound so breathlessly affectionate.

Fuck it. Nobody to impress, and it's his Goddamn vacation.

"You know my name!" the kid says, like Wade's just done the coolest magic trick ever. To be fair, he's _maybe_ five, and the typical five-year-old is easily impressed by timestream tricks.

Wade laughs, because if he doesn't, he thinks he might cry. "Yeah, that's right. Hope didn't even have to tell me. A long, long time ago, a different one of you was my best friend."

Nate grins and holds out the plate of cookies. "I helped make these. Hope says I'm good at it. You work at the same job as Hope, right? Do you go on adventures like she used to?"

Hope swats the boy lightly on the shoulder. "Hey, you, he's _on vacation_. Don't make him talk about work when he's trying to relax."

It takes a slightly unnerving amount of effort not to reflexively break Hope's wrist. "No, it's okay," Wade tells her. To Nate, he says, "Yeah, I work for the same place Hope does. But our jobs are really different." He grasps the plate in one hand and a cookie in the other, just to have something to do with his hands.

"So you didn't go on adventures?" Nate asks.

The macaroons are amazing, so Wade blissfully groans and just munches for a moment. "These are _really_ good. I went to a lot of interesting places and met some pretty strange people—I guess that counts as adventure material."

After a moment's hesitation, Nate clambers up onto Wade's lap without permission and settles in like he means to stay for a while. "Please tell me about some of them."

"Let's make a deal—I'll tell you stories as long as I've got cookies. When I run out, I won't tell you more until you make me more of these things."

So Wade spends the week stuffing his face with cookies, being lazy on the beach, and telling highly edited tales of violence and strangeness to an eager and adoring audience.

When he's back at the Core (all neon _off_, please), he feels a vague neutrality that he slowly realizes (after one-point-three-six seconds) is _contentment_.

"How was your vacation?" Temple asks as soon as she notices his presence in the conference room's wireless mainframe.

_~Thank you.~_

"That good, huh?" she chuckles. "I toldya it was a good idea."

_~No. You told me I had to go and I probably wouldn't like that fact. Can I go back?~_

"Sure. Next time your psych leave comes up on the schedule, I'll be sure t—"

_~No. To stay. Like, when the girls go back to DR. Instead of leaving me in the Tower to work on my theories, send me there. It's…it was like having a home.~_

She shrugs. "You've got a lotta accumulated leave, y'know. Hell, you could probably hang out there until we hit yellow stability. Anything about your leave y'wanna talk about? Any anecdotes to share? What's your opinion of your host family?"

He feels slightly annoyed. _~I'm sure you know all those answers.~_

"It's better for you to tell me yerself, in your own words."

Damn shrinks.

After a moment, he says, _~There's just somethin' real Goddamn nice about not having to kill a five-year-old.~_

She nods. "I bet. Hope told me he bakes a mean macaroon, too."

_~New favorite cookie,~_ Wade admits grumpily.

"How you feeling about Professor Summers?"

The same old anger flares up, skips its way past bargaining into depression and back.

_~Same.~_

"Really? Exactly the same? So if you had a viable imprint, you wouldn't be tempted to, say, brainslide him into the kid?"

Anger. Always anger. Anger and pain. He never gives bargaining a second thought since they discovered the extent of the data corruption on all of Nate's imprints.

And his damn shrink, of all people, should know he'd never sacrifice a child for something so Goddamn selfish.

_~Fuck you, Temple. You know I wouldn't be. Not even for an instant.~_

"Just checking," she says gently. "Making sure you're still you, and the time off did its work."

_~I know why I'm stuck.~_

"Okay, that's good. Why're you stuck?"

_~Because the body's still there. It's stupid, I know. Like I told you a week ago, a person is a construct that happens to be contained in an organic body. The person is gone, but some part of me's still equating that inert sack of meat with my best friend.~_

She nods. "Okay. Whatcha gonna do about that?"

_~I think…yeah. I'm gonna exercise some Power of Attorney.~_

"Good!" Temple praises. "Good for you, Wade. This is an important step. I'm very proud of you. I'll just let you run along and take care of that—you let me know if you need me for anything, okay? Anything at all. Come talk to me again when it's done, and we'll go over how you're feeling."

It's easy enough to pull up the forms he needs and fill them out. The Sysadmin approves it all so fast he sometimes wonders if the guy pays attention to what he reads. More time off-duty, re-slide to the body, tunnel to DR.

Time to stop being so Goddamn angry every moment of every day.

_Please Fasten Seat Belts_.

**.End.**


	7. Fading Embers

actually wrote this one before **Neon**. but whatev.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. cessation of life-support. flangst. sci-fi with technobabble. language: pg-13 (for f*** and g**damn).

**pairing:** none/gen (fluffy Nate/Wade bromance, background Neena/OMC).

**timeline:** NO 3652 (AD 6188), shortly after **Neon**.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) the Demo Squad girls are all on LE, but they probably have a fairly flippant attitude toward interpersonal relationships in the first place. they're all jaded sociopaths, lol. 2) in internettish, "hang one" means "give me a moment." pretty sure it started as a common typo of "hang on," but it's hard to say where non-acronym internettish comes from. 3) at the Core Compound, timesliding and gravitic tunneling are handled by separate transit officers in separate rooms-Slide Control for timeslides and Conduit Control for gravitic conduits. the Core uses Conduit Control mostly to transport supplies and inanimate masses, but since gravitic tunneling is one of the few reliable ways of transporting a Wade across timelines, they also use it to move certain Keepers (like the Auditor, if he needed to go to the Core for something). 4) "MPWL" = "mandatory psychological wellness leave." 5) "EEG" = "electro encephalograph," a common piece of equipment for examining the electrical activity of the human brain. 6) Punky was probably one of the many rescued kittens.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Fading Embers<strong>

Neena is flirting with an adorable geek of a transit officer when the call comes through.

_~Incoming transmission from Network Core.~_

"Hang one, I gotta get this," Jim apologizes.

Neena grins.

Jim pokes a button on his console. "DR Compound, confirm transmission protocols."

_~Core Compound, Conduit Control. Transporter 1022.~_

Neena frowns, but doesn't interrupt.

"Uh. Transporter 1434, confirm. Conduit Control, we're not up for any supply shipments."

_~I'm aware of that, DR. Prepare to receive the Savant.~_

Jim presses some more buttons. "Negative, Conduit Control, we don't have any systems capable of running—"

A flash of light, and Wade's striding past them.

"Oh," says Jim.

"Talktoyalater," Neena tells him, hurrying to follow Wade.

Looks like Wade's old body. Maybe a little tanned.

"Wade, hey, wait up," she calls, aware that she's making an embarrassing typewriter clik-clak with her fabulously uncomfortable shoes.

He pauses to let her catch up, throws a half-familiar look over his shoulder at her.

"Wow, it's so weird to see you do that with your own face after all this time… What's up with the body?"

"Like the geek said," Wade grunts. "I can't come here without a body."

Neena blinks.

Wade starts walking again.

Neena skitters after him and wishes she hadn't been in the middle of impressing a guy. "Well, where'd you get it, why've you even got it?"

"Part of my treat for submitting to a week of MPWL."

Her jaw drops. "You? _You_ submitted to not just your three days of the semester, but a _week_ of mandatory leave? After _how_ long skipping it?"

"Twenty-five hundred and some years," he mumbles, like he hasn't been counting every second.

Neena snorts.

He pauses to punch something into a keypad, opens a heavy door. "Good to see my codes still work."

"Wade? Wade, why are we in the specimen wing?"

The duty nurse drops her magazine and scrambles to her feet. "Sir!" she cries. "Sir, you can't be in here, this is a secure, sterile scientific—"

"Blow me, I'm the Savant," Wade says, punching his code into the inner door. "Bring me that EEG pad."

When the words _senior chrononeurologist_ show on the keypad, the nurse fumbles for a handheld pad and scurries after them.

"Wade, seriously," Neena presses. "You took your psych leave and now you're here? Does your shrink know?"

"Sure. In fact, she approves. I'm going about this all very rationally, for probably the first time since I started losing this clunker of a body."

The rows upon rows of giant fluid-filled canisters are super-duper creepy, but Neena's a big girl—instead of cowering, she complains. "Wade, honey, you do realize that this place is like Satan's fridge, right? I mean, it's totally creepin' me out, and it's not like we know anybody in here besides you—"

Wade stops walking in front of a familiar veggie-in-a-tube.

"—and Nate. Hi, Nate."

Wade takes the handheld from the duty nurse and hooks it up to the preservation canister.

Suddenly, Neena is more confused than ever. "Wade, you totally and completely loathe this place, like, even more than I do, and we haven't been in here since you signed the paperwork back in the day, and—"

"That's right, keep ranting."

"…what?"

He turns a little, shows her the screen. "You and your babbling got us _nothing_." He knocks on the canister (it makes a hollow noise like a huge fish tank). "Yoo-hoo, anybody home? Still brain-dead?"

"Did you think he'd spontaneously get better?" Neena asks. "I mean, I know sometimes coma patients just kind of wake up for no reason, but all the research showed us that the cascading neural degeneration would—"

"Nurse, can you confirm?"

"Um. Yes, patient's EEG shows no response to external stimuli."

Neena waves her hands through the air. "Wade! Hello?"

Wade types a code and holds down a big red button. "Awesome. G'bye, Nate."

An alarm on the canister goes off.

"OhmygodWade!" Neena yelps, grabbing his arm. "What are you _doing_?"

He turns to her with surprisingly clear eyes. "What I should've done thousands of years ago," he answers calmly. "He's _not in there_. We aren't our bodies; that's the whole point of what he did. Keeping an empty body alive is useless and selfish, and it had me frozen in place. I'm all grown up, I don't need my blankie anymore."

"Pff—gh—so you _set it on fire_?" she sputters.

"Well, yeah. Have you met me?"

Neena ruffles her hair and blinks for several seconds. "Are you sure you're okay? I mean, don't you think maybe you should've talked with Nessa, or—"

Wade pats her (pretty condescendingly) on the head. "Just trust me, Neena. I've got a home again. With bedtime stories, and dumb pictures on the fridge, and cookies from scratch. Sometimes, that's all it takes to be well-adjusted."

"Well-adju—Wade, when Punky got run over, you ran up to the guy while he was in the middle of apologizing, ripped the steering wheel out of his car, and beat him half to death with it."

"And then I was all better," Wade says. "This is kinda the same."

It makes sense, in a 'Wade is a little loony at the best of times' kind of way. "So. You just pulled the plug on a planetwide savior. I hope you have a can of torch-bearing-mob repellant."

"Fuck 'em," snorts Wade, scowling. "He put himself in my custody, and confirmed brain-death is grounds for termination of life-support measures. They can keep his brain for posterity, or whatever, study it to try and find a fix for the side effects, et cetera."

"And…they're gonna buy that?"

"They can suck it. I'm the goddamn Savant."

Neena gapes and tries to think of a response. She can't. Not with her fabulous shoes on. She bends over and pulls them off. "So, I'm thinking of dating Jim."

Wade looks up in thought. "Jim from transpo? The nerdy guy you were talking about last month?"

"Yep."

"Was he the nerd you were macking when I got here?"

"Yep."

"Good. Just let me get the colorful threats outta the way before you do."

"Of course. That's what BFFs are for."

**.End.**


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